


Gaze into the Abyss

by An_abundance_of_squids



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, No Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 11:20:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7572223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/An_abundance_of_squids/pseuds/An_abundance_of_squids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can see a lot in a single moment, even if it's only on face of your victim. But stare too long into that abyss and it shall one day stare back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gaze into the Abyss

 

The smell of cordite filled the air, almost masking the aura of cigarette smoke that seemed to surround the spy as he stealthily weaved his way through the discord of the ongoing battle. 

 

Out here, he was a shadow, a ghost that constantly haunted the mind of every man on the field, a specter that the mere mention of could send the entire team into a frenzied panic. 

 

Flicking out his knife with a graceful ease, he scanned the field before him in the hunt for his next target. 

 

And then he spotted it.

 

A Medic and Heavy duo, which were giving his team a hard time at the cart.

 

Smiling with the anticipation of the kill, he slipped a mask out his pocket and put it on, turning his appearance from one of a Spy into one of a Soldier.

 

It was almost too easy, slipping his way through the battle to the cart, protected only by a paper mask and his utter knowledge of the man whose skin he now possessed.

 

He had done this a million times and chances were, he'd do it a million times again – but that didn't matter. Every kill always felt like the first – the excitement of the hunt, the thrill of slipping in unnoticed among the other team soon followed by the almost indescribable pleasure of the frictionless slide with which his knife went into his victim's body, and then finally the breath-stopping escape that always followed. 

 

He wouldn't lie to himself – he didn't always manage to get that kind of kill. Sometimes things went...pear shaped and he would have to flee before he got that lovely kill, but in the end it was all worth it. Perhaps he would sometimes feel that flood of satisfaction as he plunged his knife into his worst enemy, the Pyro or that slight twinge of guilt as his victim was instead his lover’s son.

 

Medic would've called him a sadist or a Schadenfreude or a dozen other psychological terms, but he didn't care. It didn't matter, not to him.

 

Not to him. 

 

Maneuvering his way over to the duo with the lightness and tread of a dancer, he poised for a single moment behind the exposed back of the heavy, his knife glinting for a moment from the midday new Mexico sun.

  
  


Even from behind him, he was acutely aware of his victims confidence. Confidence was a powerful shield, but it wouldn't save the Russian from the cold steel of his blade. From a few metres away, to his right, he knew that the German’s face would be an almost mirror image of the heavy’s the same sadistic glee. 

 

A sadistic glee that the Spy’s face would soon share.

 

He plunged the blade into the heavy’s back.

 

For a single moment, the man's face suddenly lit up in shock and pain as the blade was thrust deep into his back, severing his spinal column and causing his limbs to suddenly spasm as the man’s nervous system was disconnected.

 

The Heavy let out a dying gasp as he slid to the ground, the steady beam of the medi-gun suddenly cutting out as the device recognised the man as dead.

 

The now undisguised Spy turned to the defenceless Medic, grinning at the prospect of yet another kill. 

 

* * *

The instant the man went down, the Medic knew.

 

Hissing something in German, the doctor spun around to face his patient’s killer. His brown eyes darted around the battlefield for help, but he was alone.

 

But he wasn't defenceless.

 

Casting the hose of the medi-gun aside, his hand went to his belt and the bone saw located there.

 

This man was a fool if he thought that he would go down  _ that  _ easily.

 

His face attached into a grin, but while the assassin’s grin was a smug one of certain victory, his own expression was one of pure pleasure.

 

He was going to enjoy this.

 

“Look at you.” The Spy muttered. “Grinning like some madman with the foolish notion that  _ you _ can beat me. You're just a  _ medic. _ ” he spat the title like an insult. “You're  _ useless. _ ”

 

“ _ Vhat did you say? _ ” The Medic hissed, a mixture of utter loathing and fury tinting suddenly his voice. 

 

“I said, you're  _ useless _ .” The Spy grinned smugly at this, having suddenly found some verbal ammunition to use against the man. “A  _ pathetic _ shadow of what you once were. A  _ coward  _ who hides in the shadow of greater men. I have seen your true face and you know as well as I zhat zhis is a  _ shallow _ parody of what you are.”

 

“Says  _ you _ . Says ze man who hides in ze fears of others. Says ze man who waits only to plunge a knife into your back. Nein,  _ you _ are the greater fool here. I may hide behind others, but I  _ do not  _ hide so I can put a knife through their backs. But out here, zere is no one for you to hide behind. Zhere is only  _ me _ .” His grin grew impossibly wider, overtaking his fury as he used his free hand to push his glasses up. “And I hide for a different reason.”

 

“You hide because you are ashamed. You hide because you are weak. You hide because you are nothing but a monster.”

 

“Nothing but a monster.” The Medic echoed curiously. “Now,  _ zhat _ is an odd comment coming from  _ you. _ ”

 

“I am a  _ professional _ . I am  _ different _ .”

 

“ _ He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. _ ” The Medic quoted. 

 

“And what iz zhat supposed to mean?” Spy asked incredulously. 

 

“You are no professional. You never were. You are just as insane as the rest of us.”

 

“I know where I stand  _ Josef _ , and it is  _ not _ with this band of whores and thieves.” The Spy hissed, finally deciding he had enough of the doctor’s riddles and lies. Expecting to catch the Medic off guard, he lunged forwards towards the man’s abdomen.

 

What the Frenchman didn't expect however, was for the other man to sidestep the attack at the very last moment, sending him stumbling forwards.

  
  


Suddenly, the Medic grabbed ahold of the back of the spy’s head and rammed it forwards, into the blue bomb cart the medic had been pushing. There was a dulled crack as the impact broke the spy’s nose, rendering it a limp, bloody lump under the featureless second skin of his balaclava. For a second, he froze in that position, forehead against the humming and ticking body of the bomb, the pain in his deformed nose temporarily overcoming any other sensation he had.

  
  


And then, his view of the world was suddenly wrenched upwards as his mask was jerked off his face in a quick motion. 

  
  


“ _ Merde… _ ” The Frenchman swore, jerking his body around to face the Medic, one hand on the cart and the other still grasping his knife.

 

“You haff seen my true face, and now I haff seen yours.” The Medic smirked, dropping the blood stained piece of fabric onto the brown-orange sand of the map. 

 

The Spy swore something in french and looked up at the Medic, sheer hatred in his face. His face was distorted by the pain of his nose, and the shame of being bested by  _ The Medic _ of all people. But while his face told that story, his eyes told a different one. Those steel blue eyes, with a glare that was uncannily like the one of the BLU Scout stared back at the Medic’s hard brown ones, filled with a look of loss as he accepted his incoming end. It was a look of acceptance that the Medic had seen on the face of many a young man as they had accepted their final breath out on the battlefield, dying for a country and a man and an ideal that they barely understood or even knew.

 

It was a look that the Medic had hoped to never see again. 

 

Had he been told years ago – back when the war he fought in was real and permanent, not this twisted joke of one – that he would one day be cause of that face and that death, not just a hapless spectator of its instigator, he would've laughed it off as some morbid delusion. As amoral as he was,  _ that _ would never happen. 

 

Of course they both knew that within minutes, he’d respawn again, but that wasn't the point. 

 

“He who fights monsters…” The Medic whispered, but this time to himself, as if reminding himself of his own precarious sanity and position.  

 

The german drew back his bonesaw, its bloodied metal tip gleaming for a second in the sunlight before he brought down in a swift jabbing moment at the Spy. And for some reason, the action cost him something. Perhaps it was some sane part of his mind calling out to him, reminding him of the oath he had never sworn to, pleading with him to rethink what he was doing.

 

But it was already too late. The saw had already sliced into the Spy’s chest, sending the man into the sickening limbo that was respawn.  

  
  


For a sickening few seconds, he froze like that, saw in the man’s chest as his eyes rolled upwards, cold and glassy with the touch of the false death of respawn. 

 

“...should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.” He finished, wrenching his saw free. He didn’t feel sick as he watched the man’s corpse side to the ground, blood spilling from the jagged wound as it laid bare the Spy’s ribs and lungs and other innards as the bone saw’s destruction was laid out before the Medic. Any disgust he might have once owned had disappeared on the fifth time he had seen someone die like that. 

 

Or the tenth. Or the twentieth. Or the fiftieth. Or perhaps it had never fully disappeared. 

 

It didnt matter. 

 

“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” He sighed, getting up and looking down at the corpse. Suddenly, he felt his age, a precious thing that his experimentation with medi-guns had stolen from him. He dropped the saw and let his shoulders droop, the energy of his mania suddenly gone from him. 

 

“Uh...doc?” 

 

The doctor spun around to see behind stood their Scout, hand clutching at a wounded shoulder. For a single moment, their eyes met and the Medic saw they were hauntingly similar to his victims, steel blue eyes filled not with acceptance, but with a jaded look beyond his youthful years. A jaded look obtained not from the games they fought in, nor the war he and the spy had once fought in, but from an unfair life full of empty promises and broken dreams

 

For a single moment, he wanted to yell, to tell the youth to run away from here and this place before what fragments of hope and idealism he had left were crushed out of him in this cruel game that despite it all, was no different from the harsh reality of war. A war that no matter where or how it was fought, never changed. 

 

But then it passed, and he was left with nothing more than a silent but painful feeling of old regret and guilt.

 

* * *

 

 

_whew_ feels good to write something different for a change. I guess. Its not really _that_ different, but still. also, challenge! yay! 


End file.
